Resident Evil
Cerberus
For fans of the original 1996 release of Resident Evil, there is a scene early on that seems to define most players’ first recollections of the game. As the playable character is moving down an innocuous-looking corridor in the Spencer Mansion, with no enemies in sight, a zombified dog suddenly crashes through a window behind you. The music changes to a frantic percussion track that ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels. Your instinctive reaction is to run away, but up ahead, a second half-rotted mutt bursts through another window, cutting off your means of escape and trapping you between them. The zombie dogs aren’t overly dangerous – they don’t deal a lot of damage and they require fewer bullets to kill than a human zombie – but they are fast and hard to shoot, and thanks to the unexpected nature of the jump scare and the panic that immediately follows, regaining your composure and taking them down efficiently is easier said than done.
The ‘zombie dog hallway’ is one of Resident Evil‘s most iconic moments. I didn’t experience it in the original game because I was too young to play it, but there is a very similar scene in the 2002 remake. This time, it’s slightly different, to keep players of the original game on their toes. When you walk through that same hallway, no dogs come crashing through the window. They throw themselves at the glass, but it holds. They don’t get in. You’re safe.
Until, that is, you come back to the hallway later in the game. You’re running down the corridor again, your mind probably on your destination or a puzzle you need to solve, when the zombie dogs make a second, more successful attempt at their dramatic entrance. I vividly remember jumping out of my skin at that moment, back when I first played the game as a young teenager. I instinctively pressed the ‘pause’ button. I don’t think I returned to the game for at least ten minutes, after I’d calmed down.
The zombie dogs you encounter at various points in the game are actually bioweapons (B.O.W.s) called Cerberus, named after the Greek myth of the ‘hounds of Hades’1. The Cerberus is the result of administering the t-Virus into a large, fully grown Doberman Pinscher, a highly capable military dog breed, which had received prior training. This project began in the early 1980s during the development of the β strain of the t-Virus. It was hoped that the improved strain would create mutants more suitable for sale as military products.
Outwardly, the Cerberus is not so different from a large dog, but the virus has dramatically augmented its muscular strength and combative instinct. Like zombies, their epidermis is severely decomposed, resulting in exposed bones and tissue. Their musculature, however, is still largely intact, and their running ability and endurance have been greatly enhanced. They seem to excel at long-distance, high-speed movement (which is why I couldn’t get any decent screenshots of them for this article).
The Cerberus also retain their pack mentality and, when they spot their prey, they attack in waves with their companions to hunt it down. Since the Cerberus lacks any sense of fear, its tolerance towards pain and gunshots is higher than that of regular military dogs, so it attacks ferociously until it kills its opponent, often by going for the throat. In keeping with a dog’s inherently sociable nature, the Cerberus can also be trained to follow basic commands. However, their extreme aggressiveness makes them difficult to control. They are always hungry and possess a strong killing impulse. In addition, because their brain functions slowly decay over time (much like a human zombie), control becomes even harder the longer they live.
Nonetheless, because of its low cost (since it was created from an existing animal rather than being genetically spliced), the Cerberus was deemed a success and clones were mass-produced. Tests were conducted on several Cerberuses in the courtyard of the Spencer Mansion to see how they cooperated and attacked in a group. However, after the t-Virus outbreak, several of them escaped from the estate and became wild in the surrounding forest. Hungry and lacking their Umbrella trainers, they turned feral and began attacking and killing hikers. It was, in fact, these creatures that were responsible for the series of bizarre incidents that led Chris, Jill, and the other members of S.T.A.R.S. into the Arklay Mountains in the first place.
- It should be noted that the zombie dogs encountered in later games, such as Resident Evil 2 and 3, are not Cerberuses. They are regular dogs that have been secondarily infected by the t-Virus, usually after consuming a contaminated food source, rather than Umbrella bioweapons. ↩︎